Super-class Star Destroyer
Vfd The Super-class Star Destroyer was a massive warship, designed and built for the Imperial Starfleet by Lira Wessex and her Kuat Drive Yards team. The name could occasionally be extended to describe other Super Star Destroyers, and the specific Super-class design was often confused with the even larger, but similar-looking, ''Executor''-class Star Dreadnought. Statistics and Capabilities The Super-class Star Destroyer was 8,000m long, armed with 250 turbolaser batteries, 250 heavy turbolaser batteries, 250 ion cannons, 250 concussion missile tubes, and 40 tractor beams. It carried twelve TIE squadrons (including two TIE Interceptor squadrons) and more than fifty other small craft. For ground operations, it carried a full corps of ground troops, apparently mixing stormtrooper legions with regular Army personnel, plus 25 AT-ATs, 50 AT-STs, and three prefab garrison bases. A single ship of this class was normally considered the equal of ten or twenty ''Imperial''-class ships, and they were used as command ships by many of the most important Sector Fleets in the Empire. Confusion with Executor At 8,000m from bow to stern, the Super-class ships were often proclaimed as the largest combat starships in the Galaxy when they entered service after the Battle of Yavin. In fact, Darth Vader's mighty new flagship Executor was much larger and more powerful, but her true size and firepower were kept secret, and she was widely misidentified as a Super-class ship herself, apparently as a result of a deliberately engineered program of deception. Although the Super-class ships were less than half the length of Executor, and a mere fraction of the tonnage of that behemoth, they were designed along closely similar lines, and were still many times bigger than most other warships in known space. The first batch of Super-class ships even entered service at around the same time as Executor, and the Imperial military was able to play off the broad similarities of the two types to ensure that the civilian public and most Rebel Alliance personnel remained confused for many years. Additionally, however, there were also indications that the deception was maintained even at the highest levels within the Empire. Extant documents indicate that the Navy high command even claimed that Executor was a Super-class ship to members of the mighty Ruling Council when negotiating with them over budgetary allocations. The misdirection program also caused some confusion in nomenclature and designation: the "Super-class" moniker is sometimes applied to Executor, and also to a number of other massive Imperial cruiser and dreadnaught designs, such as the ''Gauntlet''-class, the mighty ''Eclipse''-class and ''Sovereign''-class Star Destroyers. Behind the scenes The Super-class Star Destroyer was proposed by several fans as a way to resolve several of the problems discussed at SSD Continuity Issues. When the length of Executor was officially retconned upwards, first to 8 miles and then to 19km, to more closely correspond to the scale indicated by the FX models used in the movies, a significant number of references to an 8,000-meter Super Star Destroyer remained in Expanded Universe sources, and it was suggested that these references could perhaps indicate a smaller class of ship, with the attribution of Executor to this class being a result of error or disinformation. Until recently, this conjecture remained entirely in the realms of fanon, but an obscure but official source has recently suggested that only Executor and possibly one other ship were in fact the larger retconn size: If only Executor and perhaps Lusankya were 19km behemoths, this would, of course, imply that the other ships identified as 8km Super-class ships should remain at that size, thus preserving the basic consistency of this aspect of Star Wars continuity. At present, this one reference tips the balance fractionally in favor of the existence of an 8km "Super-class", notwithstanding that these Star Destroyers were originally conceived as sister-ships for Executor. However, on March 9th 2006, the Wizards of the Coast SW Q&A section countered this claim by both stating the length of the Executor and all ships in its class as being 19 000 km. This still keeps the 8 km Super-class as a possibility, if ships identified as this are not also identified as being of the Executor-class, as with the Intimidator (mentioned as being of the Executor-class), the Brawl or the Razor's Kiss (sister-ships that were indicated as being part of the Lusankya/''Executor''´s original generation). If the Super-class ship is indeed canonically distinct from the Executor, further questions remain, most notably about their exact appearance. The illustrations of the ships in old West End Games role-playing material differ from Executor as seen in the movies in a number of ways, most notably in having nine heat exhausts rather than the bigger ship's thirteen, and a proportionally larger command tower, and the Vengeance in the computer game Star Wars: X-wing vs. TIE Fighter is different again. However, other comparable illustrations boast comparable discrepancies to movie images, and Super-class ships may "really" be closer in proportion to the Executor (although on a reduced scale) than these images suggest. Sources *''The Imperial Sourcebook'' *''Star Wars: The Official Figurine Collection'' *Wizards of the Coast website Category:Star Destroyer variants Category:Star Wars culture